The titles of Ana Holck’s most recent works presume a state of action, since their representation of movement is undeniable. Although they are not kinetic pieces, her works evidence a forcefield, an energy emanating from their internal paths, in which lies a vibration in a continuous state. The stainless steel generates a tangle that expresses and confers width to this incessant movement, a structure under development that produces a multiplicity of free movements that are, however, ambiguously conditioned and regulated by each other. It bears noting, therefore, that the lines’ continuity and plasticity must be obtained and conquered by the work itself, which has overcome inertial force and continues to impose itself in view of a range of possibilities.
I would also say that steel is a line, and, in that sense, objects made of it are transitional: if, on the one hand, three-dimensionality draws them nearer to sculptures and references such as Constructivism and Post-Minimalism, on the other, the (steel) line and the fact that they are fastened to the wall reverberate a pictorial presence. This metallic tangle is also imbued with gestuality, which demarcates the practice of painting or drawing. In a discontinuous handling of the surface, Holck creates tension in the steel so that, instead of simply approaching or conquering space, she experiments with it. In that sense, the works have a speculative and projectual nature, for they rupture the allusive and traditional representational space.
This group of works, like embranchments, point to the field of sculpture and, more specifically, an occurrence or an image that follows the artist since the beginning of her trajectory, the construction site, considering the choice of materials related to construction and engineering; on the other hand, the works also admit their presence as registers of the “artists’ hands” on the steel/lines, the markings of a drawing in space.
Porcelain is the axis through which these tangles traverse; it is through this fixed and porous structure, since steel bursts through it, that the tangle of lines turns into a disturbing event: steel’s disquieting and challenging movement denounces an accelerated time, in counterpoint to porcelain’s static impulse – two times in simultaneous action. Porcelain, however, is a stable and resistant beam that demarcates a territory of control and sustenance. Having said that, it is through porcelain that gesture, line and space are prolongated in an impulsive and dynamic state. As the artist emphasizes, “porcelain is raw material, non-industrialized, prefabricated.” Clay, the first step in the production of ceramics, “goes through an extruder, an equipment out of which the mass comes in regular, preestablished tubes of gauge.” The use of the extruder “erases the fingerprints left by the handling of the mud; it becomes, therefore, impersonal, going against clay’s malleable nature.”
At first, the works seem to demarcate a very rigid, objective and cold execution of the production. But the artists’ decision to make use of porcelain tubes and the way the tangle of steel (or is it a brushstroke? a line on a paper?) presents itself in space – drawing nearer and further, with no defined direction, concentrating and scattering as if in a magnetic field in search of magnetization – express a definitive gestural, authorial and unique character. These are strategies capable of rupturing the brute materiality and reference introduced by steel’s own physicality. Furthermore, the tangles of steel spread quickly, breaking in an objective fashion all the rigidity of the flat and straight shapes.
The choice of circles and ellipses turn the state of tension and relaxation into a recurrent one. The lines, that is, the works’ structure, close in on the spectator. They transform themselves into an experience in which we feel the focused energy in that state of expansion and dilation of the shapes. More than that, what one suavely assumes – although still evoking its presence – are shadows. The projection of light on the pieces evidences their continuity on the flat wall. It remakes the drawing and eliminates its rigidity, turning the piece into an eternal construction. Lines are sketched on the mirroring caused by the light, but at the same time they announce that they can neither be limited, nor surrounded or contained. They desire space and an absolute exteriority. These are virtual drawings, provisional constructions, although they are not precarious (neither in sense nor in quality). They scratch the wall, moving on the surface, in the attempt at permanence, but are conscious of their own aversion to the presence of matter. As in light elements, these projected lines are formed as if by a weightless architecture.
Curiously, this instability, which originates from an order planned by the artist, implicates a resemblance to dancing. The circularity of these gestures, in fact, also akin to abstract expressionism, promotes the representation of a dislocation in space. In this sense, one can think of the correlation between this image and dancing. The moving and staggering shapes want to cross the flat surface and reach space. At least they seem to desire this.
Lastly, the tangles traverse space without occupying it. In its circularities and twists with neither beginnings nor endings, neither fronts nor backs, neither interiors nor exteriors, this group of works is a sculptural development of the lessons contained in the Möbius strip, an image so dear to Neo-Concrete artists such as Franz Weissmann, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape. This is intriguing, since, although the pieces are fastened to the wall, they effectively oppose this anchorage, insisting on going from one place to another. Donald Judd, writing on the works of Mark di Suvero, another important reference I identify in Holck’s production, states that he uses “iron beams as if they were brushstrokes, imitating their movement.”A more contemporaneous reference for the artist’s work also present, however, in minimalist forces is the work of Richard Deacon. In After (1998), the British sculptor built a long, horizontal, hollow tube made of wooden arches, creating a continuous and circular shape. The rims are regularly distanced, producing the effect of a truss through which the spectator can see, reproducing the experience of the grid. The sculpture has aspects that marked the artists’ production, as one can see in the series Cut & Fold (2022) and New Alphabet (2018). In these cases, Deacon works with materials shaped into strips or sheets, generally intertwined, avoiding solid or closed forms. The choice of also turning the piece into a speculative experience on emptiness approximates Deacon’s – an artist who also uses ceramics in his productions – and Holck’s poetics.
Lastly, I would say that the works in the exhibition play the lead precisely in this constellation of spatiotemporal virtualities, of undulating and twisted shapes, producing an architecture capable of sucking the space around them into their internal dynamics.
[Felipe Scovino]
